How to reduce the noise in your life so you more get focused

Are you looking for ways to be better, faster, more efficient and focused?

Me too. Recently I’ve been doing some self-development work on refining my purpose, my vision and getting more specific on who I am and want to become.

I’ve started working on a new project that aligns with my mission and purpose and I want to focus so I can take this project to a level I have never achieved before. **More on the specifics of the project later as it’s still in the infancy stage.

Through this self-development process, I’ve reached a point where I’ve realized I have too many distractions in my life and not enough focus.

I’m a very busy guy. I have my consulting & coaching work I do for clients, writing this blog, and several other smaller projects I’m doing and that doesn’t include the fact that I have a family with three kids under 7. I’m busy and prioritization and focus is important for survival.

Recently I’ve found myself caught in the trap of simply trying to do too much. Too many projects, too many emails, too many notifications and simply too much noise in my life.

It was this quote from Jim Rohn that was the seed for this post.

“Every day, stand guard at the door of your mind, and you alone decide what thoughts and beliefs you let into your life. For they will shape whether you feel rich or poor, cursed or blessed.”
— Jim Rohn

I’m now standing guard at the door to my mind.

To reduce the noise, I’m reevaluating every project, every email newsletter and every social account that is not focused and supporting my vision and mission.

If you find yourself in a similar place, I suggest you reevaluate what you are consuming and getting distracted by.

Getting Started

To start this process I needed to take inventory of where the distractions were coming from.

This includes emails, mobile app notifications, social media notifications and the news I consume.

Cleaning out email

I have several email account but three primary ones. One for Marketing Stream, one for our corporation WYSIWYG Ventures and my personal Gmail account.

I’ve had these email addresses for over 5 years and have subscribed to many lists over the years. Many I just never read but still have to archive or deal with taking up time and distracting me multiple times a day.

Right now, my inboxes are polluted with too much email so I have started to unsubscribe from email lists that just don’t serve my primary focus and archive everything.

You can sit and do this all at once but if your inbox is like mine, it will probably take a more time. Next time you are standing in line for a coffee or have some time to kill, start unsubscribing and removing yourself from the email lists that you don’t need.

The goal for my email inboxes is Inbox Zero.

What is Inbox Zero? “It’s about how to reclaim your email, your atten­tion, and your life. That “zero?” It’s not how many mes­sages are in your inbox–it’s how much of your own brain is in that inbox. Especially when you don’t want it to be. That’s it.” – Merlin Mann

Cleaning out social media notifications

Social media notifications are very distracting. Moreso recently as these platforms want to interrupt you and create an opportunity to log in and spend time on the platform as much as possible. For this reason, many of the notification defaults are set to On.

Here are links to Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter notifications settings so you can make the changes required. I have to do this for several accounts I manage. Review all of the email and mobile notification settings and turn off anything you don’t need.

In Closing

If you are looking for ways to be better, faster, more efficient and focused than I hope you found this useful and I hope you decided to reduce the noise in your life so you can focus on your mission with everything you’ve got.

What do you do to reduce the noise in your life?

Please leave an answer in the comments below.

Leave a Comment